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A guide to using Ukelele
In this article you’ll create a custom keyboard layout for Mac OS that you can use to enter special Unicode characters or unsupported languages.
Default keyboards
Mac OS offers a lot of language options and keyboard layouts out of the box. You can find them by going to System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources. Then click the + plus button to add another one.
However, if you speak a minority language or need some other special purpose keyboard, you may not be able to find it.
As a case in point, I’m teaching an English phonetics class this term, and while online keyboards like ipa.typeit.org work fine, I need a more convenient solution to type the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) directly on my computer. I also need another keyboard to write traditional Mongolian script, which isn’t included in the Mac OS supported keyboard list.
Creating a custom keyboard
In order to create a custom keyboard, you need to make a keyboard layout bundle. Ukelele will help you do that. It’s a program created by the well known linguistics organization SIL International.
Follow along with me as I make my IPA keyboard. You can adjust the steps to meet your own needs.
Find the Unicode symbols
Your keyboard will be inputting Unicode characters, so first of all you should gather the characters that you’ll need. Here are some places that you can do that:
- Character Viewer (preinstalled app on Mac OS)
- Official Unicode site (find by language block)
- Unicode Lookup (find codes by cut and paste)
- Unicode Character Recognition (find characters by freehand drawing)
- Unicode search (find characters by category or by describing them)
- Unicode code converter (find code numbers for Unicode characters)
